[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I completely agree. When I first saw some of the issues ( in US ), my first reaction was that of disbelief. I simply could not believe this is the way it is set up.

If US has any defense, it is that it is not alone in this craziness as almost every bigger power center carefully manages its domain to ensure it remains a relevant player. To put it simply, there is too much money in managing different pipes.

At this point though, short of complete collapse necessitating full rewrite of the existing payment systems, standardization will not happen. ISO itself is a convoluted mess with one real benefit of using standard XML.

[datavirtue]

The government has typically abdicated payments to various proprietary networks and big banks in the US. Try getting your hands on the NACHA spec for our glacial "direct" deposit standard.

We also have no standard way of letting users authenticate to their bank to download transactions. Once you get logged in there is usually a way to get OFX (QFX) files but the process is manual. I happened on the European open banking documentation the other day...jealous.